Parking in Prestwick – A Glimmer of Light

Parking has long been a sore point in Prestwick. There is a severe shortage of parking facilities and the vast majority of parking spaces are on-street. Even these spaces have been put under pressure over the last couple of years by irresponsible airport customers unwilling to pay for airport parking simply leaving their cars in Prestwick’s streets and disappearing for days, weeks and even months at a time.

As long as the cars have a valid road fund licence there is nothing that the police can do to remove them. Up until now the parking problems have been treated on an ad-hoc basis, one or two streets at a time. This has not been terribly satisfactory as residents of those streets which have been made subject to time-limited parking restrictions are delighted that they no longer have airport customers parking outside their homes, but the residents of houses in streets close by are very unhappy as this has resulted in the displacement of the cars into their streets where they are parked outside their homes.

A couple of years ago the roads department officers recommended that no more one-off solutions should be applied but that what was needed was a full blown survey of the whole of Prestwick to deal with all traffic management problems including parking, especially airport parking. Unfortunately this does not come cheap and has so far never taken place. However I am delighted to be able to say that at this month’s Leadership Panel we were advised that the council had a budget surplus for the year ended 5th April 2007 of just under £3.5m. A decision was taken by the panel to transfer £1m to reserves, to ring fence a further £1m towards meeting the funding gap which will arise when we come to do the budget for 2008/2009, to transfer £200k to the contingency fund and to invest £1.3m in badly needed priority projects.

One of these projects is the traffic management and parking survey so badly needed in Prestwick. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing what the cost of implementing the results of such a survey will be and finding those resources will be the next challenge to face councillors. However the good news is that the problem is recognised as severe and is now being tackled. This survey will give us a starting point from which to build an action plan to secure a sensible traffic management and parking solution for the future for the town of Prestwick